Accountants in Hackney Wick

First-year traders around Hackney Wick tend to make the same three mistakes: registering late, mixing business and personal spending in one account, and saving nothing for the first tax bill. All three are avoidable in an afternoon of setup.

Plenty of people incorporate too early because it "sounds established", then pay for accounts, confirmation statements and payroll they didn't need. The switch pays for itself at the right profit level — the trick is knowing yours.

A limited company juggles two regulators: Companies House wants accounts within nine months of year end, HMRC wants corporation tax paid at nine months and a day. Same starting point, different documents — and late filing penalties at Companies House escalate automatically and are rarely cancelled.

Crypto traders rack up hundreds of taxable events without noticing, because every swap counts as a disposal. Specialist software plus the pooling rules turns the mess into a number; guessing does not.

The best salary-dividend mix moves with each year's thresholds and your other income. Setting it once in April — rather than guessing through the year — is one of the simplest pieces of planning a director can do.

If you contract through your own limited company, IR35 asks whether you'd be an employee without it. For medium and large clients, the status decision is theirs; for small clients, it's still yours — and getting it wrong in either direction costs money.

The July payment on account is the forgotten deadline: no return is due, but money often is. We diary it for every client it applies to, because HMRC charges interest from the day it's late even though nothing was "filed" late.

Most self-employed people under-claim. Use of home, mileage at HMRC's approved rates, phone and broadband apportionment, trade subscriptions, training that updates existing skills — legitimate deductions left on the table add up to real tax overpaid year after year.